Games of the year, 2005

While I expect to play a few more games before the year is up, my top
10 for the year is pretty much cemented, so here it is:

Fiese Freunde Fette Feten (13 plays)

In addition to an engaging theme and a high "fun" factor, I
really enjoy the mechanics of this game. It melds auctions,
multi-dimensional optimization and careful timing into a great gaming
experience.

Crokinole (32 plays)

We've had a Crokinole board at my office for a while now, but this year several of my colleagues decided it was something worth playing at lunch, so it
definitely makes the list this year.

Blue Moon (10 plays)

See my recent review for more detailed comments. I'm glad I gave this a second look.

Around the World in 80 days (4 plays)

Light, novel, fun.

Jambo (6 plays)

A great two player that is interesting on the first play and leaves some substantial depth to explore beyond that.

Fairy Tale (6 plays)

Maybe not the "best filler ever", but a solid filler that, unlike many, has improved with repeat play.

Heroscape (6 plays)

One of the big hits of 2004 remains extremely entertaining. This would be higher if I had more opportunities to play it.

Electronic Catchphrase (15 plays)

King of party games, remains king.

Battlestations (1 play)

Only one play, but I'm eager to play more. It's a four hour game session, and I am usually not so happy with long games, but this game satisfies at more levels than most.

Techno Witches (4 plays)

The pre-programming mechanic combined with measured movement create a surprisingly clever range of tactical options.

Runners up: Louis XIV, Shadows over Camelot, Punct, Ticket to Ride, Princes of Florence, Easy Come Easy Go, Apples to Apples, Rumis, Palazzo, Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck.

Blue Moon Review

(this is a combination of a review and some more specific comments on deck-building experiences with Blue Moon)

I had played a couple games of Blue Moon in 2004 when it first came
out, and was unimpressed. The art was pretty, but the theme didn't
really grab me and the gameplay somehow seemed unremarkable. I
essentially dismissed it.

Fast forward to fall of this year; Every couple of years, I get the
urge to play a game like Magic: The Gathering, but I've avoided it for
several reasons, despite certain appeal. The appealing features of
Magic, to me, include lots of permutations for play, a variety of
strategic approaches, opportunities for clever tactical play, and in
particular, the ability to do deckbuilding. Deckbuilding games are
appealing because they allow substantial strategic exploration before
actually playing. Most German-style games don't allow for a lot of
pre-game strategic planning. But, Magic has some huge flaws from my
perspective: blind purchases, an extremely deep money pit, and
gameplay I don't find that engaging. Well, in the process of
exploring the desire for this kind of game, I found a lot of people
saying very positive things about Blue Moon. Further, a guy I game
with regularly had recently gotten into it and had very positive
things to say about it, so I gave it another try.

Blue Moon seemed to satisfy all of the requirements. It had many
permutations (8 pre-built pre-balanced decks that were all reported to
be interesting), a range of strategies, tactics and the ability to
build decks. Further, it has no blind purchases and the "money pit"
aspect is limited. Because of the way the rules are constructed, a
(retail-priced) purchase of about $100 gets you every card and the
ability to build every legally constructable deck. So, for $200 (no
small sum of money, but still, limited) two players can play with
absolutely no limitations. In contrast, most CCGs, $200 will give you
a good start, but will only scratch the surface of the possible amount
one could spend. Finally, the comments on the net assured me the
gameplay was more compelling than it originally seemed.

So, I gave it another try, and I must say I've been extremely
impressed. The deckbuilding aspect intrigued me the most, but I
played quite a few games with the stock decks first. It's impressive
to me how dramtically different each of these pre-built decks are, and
yet how well balanced they are against each other. Each has its own
style of play, some more similar, and some rather different. But,
what I really wanted to try was the deck building.

Deck building

The Emissaries & Inquisitors deck give a variety of interesting
deck-building options with the Inquisitor cards. So, I designed a
bunch of decks (see them at my Blue Moon Deck
Database), and recently had the opportunity to play a couple of
games with these constructed decks. I remain extremely pleased and
entertained. The first game we played was using decks we each thought
were reasonably strong. My deck was a Mimix-based deck that had a
huge number of free cards. This meant I could very quickly play a
great many cards. My opponent's deck was a Flit deck aimed at
blocking strong cards and using direct dragon attraction cards to add
a little offensive power. The game was quite close with my deck
hammering hard on the offensive, while the Flit managed to keep
blocking most of those attacks. In the end, the Mimix won, though
only barely.

The second deck-building match we each played a deck we didn't think
we necassarily be particularly strong. I played an Aqua deck built
with the goal of being able to outlast an opponent in nearly any
fight. Through a combination of high valued cards and a large number
of shield cards (mutants and non-mutants), it would be a rare
circumstance where this deck would truly be forced to retreat and
combined with the Aqua's "Water of Immortality", there's no particular
reason to avoid burning through cards. My opponent's deck was a Khind
"one-trick" deck, but it was a powerful trick. The trick was to
collect a hand containing the right set of cards and be able to play
them all at once: both floods (forcing your opponent to retreat,
immediately) along with an number of cards which increase the number
of dragons attraced if the opponent retreats. The result was a very
unusual, but interesting game.

The entire game lasted only three fights. The first fight involved a
huge number of cards on both sides. At least 10 cards for each of us,
if not more. In the end, the Khind were forced to retreat, but
unbeknownst to me he had accumulated most of the cards into his hand
required for his "trick". A few cards into the second fight, my
opponent made an error that would rapidly lead to me winning. In the
interest of seeing how it would turn out without that error, I
suggested we back out the move. Having backed out this last play, he
managed to quickly get the full complement of required cards in his
and and triggered the trick. Two floods meant I was forced to retreat
and had to concede four dragons, moving it from two on my side to two
on his. By this point, my opponent was using his Inquisitor Razor
Mind's ability to discard cards at every opportunity. My deck
remained strong, but before I could get to 6 on my side, he was able
to retreat, ceding me a single dragon, and then discard the remaining
2 or 3 cards in his hand for the win. Overall, a very interesting
game.

So far, I remain very interested in this game. The deckbuilding
affords a number of opportunities for strategy and analysis outside of
the context of an individual game. The gameplay itself is more fun
than I originally recognized, and experience with the decks certainly
helps. Further, the basic mechanic (a brinkmanship mechanic, not
unlike Taj Mahal) works far better in a two player game than it does
in multi-player game. Overall, a very enjoyable game experience, and
definitely it is the first I have found that truly successfully
scratches that "game like Magic" itch. Rating: A+

Licensing and Advertising

For a while now, I've had a few Google AdSense ads on my site, as an
experiment. I think the program is a great idea, and it's easy to use
and in general fairly unobtrusive. The ads that get selected are
frequently comically mismatched to the content due to homonyms or the
like, though. In any case, I figured if I could generate some revenue off of
this website, that'd be a nice fringe benefit.

When it comes down to it, it's not very much money. If it worked out
to, say, $100/year, that might feel like it's worth it. It's not very
much money, but I could buy a few games with it and it would be a nice
perk. In reality, it's not even that much, and for such a small
amount, I'd get more satisfaction from providing the content here
unsullied by the clutter of advertising (even as unobtrusive as Google
AdSense is). So, unless something changes, I'll probably continue the
experiment til the end of the year and then remove all the ads.

On a related note, I've officially put the Creative Commons license
for this blog on the web page. I used the "Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License". In the majority of cases, if
you want to commercially use any of my content (text, images, source
code) that is not explicitly otherwise licensed, I am happy to grant a
royalty-free license for such, but I do require that I be contacted
first.

In the end, I don't put stuff here in the hopes of making a buck, I do
it because I think it makes the web a better place and it gives me an
outlet for the occasional self-indulgent rambling. I really enjoy
hearing stories from people about how their 12-year-old loves the
Heroscape Combat Simulator, or that my discussion of Baby Signs
convinced their spouse to give it a try. So, let me know if you
like/appreciate/use the stuff I put here.

Update (12/9): Several people commented that part of the issue
is that there are no ads in the RSS. This is true, but I'm not
convinced it would make a big difference anyway, for two reasons: 1) A
lot of evidence suggests "regulars" of sites don't click on ads. If
you've subscribed to the RSS feed, you're a "regular". 2) I get a lot
of random visitor traffic, mostly through google, and this is a far
greater number of visitors than the "regulars". I estimate somewhere
around 100 regular RSS-based readers of this blog. In contrast, the
web version of the blog and the Heroscape related stuff I've built in
particular (which have AdSense on them) have somewhere in the ballpark
of 1000 unique new visitors per week, excluding search engines, other
robots, etc.

I may actually try to break down the ad revenue page-by-page and leave
them on some pages if one or two pages represent the bulk of the
revenue, I may leave it. Further, I may leave the highest revenue
pages in place long enough to get over the threshold at which they'll
send me a check. In any case, I find ads in RSS much more annoying
than most ads, so I don't foresee myself ever putting those in this
blog/feed.

On additional note for those who read via RSS: If you're interested in
reading the comments on current "front page" entries in RSS as well as
the entries themselves, there is an RSS feed that includes them at
http://mkgray.com:8000/blog/index.crss. Enjoy.

Apple Picking

Apple Picking at Shelburne Farm

Blue Moon Deck DB

I've been playing Blue Moon a bunch recently. It's very interesting.
I had played it a couple times and been pretty unimpressed, but recent
comments online and in person made me give it a second look and I'm
glad I did. Just a few weeks ago, the final two expansion decks were
released. This means some of the more advanced deckbuilding
capabilities are fully possible. Personally, I find the idea of a
deckbuilding game quite appealing, but the blind purchase aspect of
CCGs has been such a negative feature to me that I've avoided them.
Blue Moon has some very CCG like qualities, with two big
qualifications: There are no blind purchases and the money pit is much
shallower -- you can own every deck and given that the rules prohibit
duplicate cards in a deck, construct every conceivable deck for $105,
if you pay full retail cost.

So, I decided it would be nice to have a tool to help build decks and
more importantly, a place to share these constructed decks online.
So, I built the Blue Moon Deck DB, a web based tool to help design and share decks. It's Firefox only and is a little rough around the edges. I'm hoping to add more features soon, but I'm interested in feedback and once I'm comfortable with its stability, I'll post it to the wider audience at BGG and perhaps elsewhere.

More Essen 2005 Games

I got to play several more Essen 2005 games this weekend and replay a
couple I played earlier. I finally did play Caylus. All of the below
comments are based on only a play or two, but you may notice a
recurring theme: "I don't need to buy it." Oh well. The best game
experience of the weekend was Lord of the Rings. We played with all the expansions, including the dark tiles.
I was Sauron managed to get the Dark Rider back to Mordor just
as Sam was about to drop the ring into Mount Doom. I had just barely failed to nail them in Bree, then again in Isengard and again in Shelob's Lair. A very satisfying game for all involved.
Normally, for me, novelty goes a long way, so to have a 5-year-old game (admittedly, one of my favorites) be the best gaming experience of the weekend says something. I'm usually sufficiently big into "what's new" that that excitement exceeds a good experience at my favored games. Not so this time. Caylus and Antike came close though, but were not quite there.

Caylus

It's outstanding, but it's not quite as earth shaking as many have made it
out to be. It's long, and it can have some downtime, which is not a good combination. It seems that usually it will be quite engaging with little downtime, but the length detracts. Above and beyond that, there's a nicely interlocking set of mechanisms, but nothing amazingly clever or revolutionary. It's a very well done resource management game with some novelty in the mechanisms. A definite buy, but it's not Puerto Rico. Even with experienced players, it's going to take 100-150 minutes, maybe more.

Big Kini

Good exploration game, but when it comes down to it, another player summed it up: "more of the same". It's got nice mechanisms, bits, and all that, though it lacks a feeling of tension.

Beowulf

Oh, I so wanted to like this. After the first play, I was luke warm. One third of the way into the second play, I was hopeful, it looked like there might be some interesting and deeper hand management decisions than it originally seemed. Then, luck happened. I like luck in games. A lot. But, Beowulf has luck in the same (and only) place it has strategy and tactics: hand management. In addition to the luck of the draw, which is reasonably small and the usual factor in hand management games, it has the so called "risks", particularly during "major episodes" which are basically a magnified "luck of the draw". A good draw in a mid-episode risk is very beneficial. A bad draw in a mid-episode risk is very bad. If the luck were instead somewhere else, say in the selection of the order of the episodes, or in some other aspect of the game, it might not ruin it, but I think the potential variability of the swings of luck that so fundamentally and directly affect the core of the game eliminates too much of the impact of earlier decisions. At least I know I don't need another big box filling up shelf space.

Fettnapf

Enh. Cute mechanic and nice integration of cardplay and memory, but in the end I'm not sure I believe your decisions (what card to play) really makes much of a difference.

Shear Panic

The Aardman-esque sheep are really cute, but when it comes down to it, it's an abstract puzzle game and really not that interesting of one. Plus, it seems to have some kingmaker issues which is even more annoying in a puzzle game.

Poison

This was good. Not amazing, not revolutionary, but quick, a nice refinement of the Too Many Cooks mechanic and fun. It's a shame it's so overproduced. If Amigo (or someone else) comes out with a version in the small "standard" card box size, I'll definitely pick it up. Otherwise, I'll hold on to that shelf space and play someone else's copy.

Sag's mit Symbolen

We played this, thinking it would be a nice light not-quite-party-game. Oops. It's an odd little pseudo-deduction/clue-giving game. It's actually got some rather interesting and difficult decisions. It'd be nice to have it in English, but using a translation sheet wasn't bad.

Cash & Guns

Very cute, simple bluff, counter-bluff, special-powers, awesome-foam-handgun game. Unfortunately, it's outrageously expensive for what it is. Again, as a straight small package card game, I'd probably pick it up. As is, I can pass.

Techno Witches

I commented on this earlier, but my impression remains very positive and if anything, has improved. Fun, fast, clever, interesting.

Mesopotamia

I commented on this earlier as well. A second play neither improved nor degraded my impression. It's quite good, though it feels a little dry in the end.

Antike

The surprise hit of the weekend for me. It's a 2 hour (less with experienced players, I presume) civilization building game which very effectively captures that "Civ Lite" target so many people seem to have been shooting for and missing. At its core is a shockingly simple, but amazingly elegant, clever, and effective action selection mechanism. Basically, you have a "wheel of actions" and after your first turn action, you may choose (and move to) any of the next 3 actions on the wheel as your next action or pay to move to an action further around the wheel. This prevents you from doing the same thing over and over and because of the positioning of the actions on the wheel makes it hard to alternate or otherwise rapidly cycle through complimentary actions. You can do it somewhat, but at a cost, both literal and in opportunity. Further, each action is "small" which means your turn can be played very very fast. At the beginning of the game, 5-10 second turns. By the end of the game, 30 second turns. This means you remain engaged in the game constantly. It manages to do all this while packing in the core elements of a good civilization building game: expansion, building (cities & temples), resources, warfare, and technology.

14-month old board gamer

I'm as pleased as can be. As I href=http://www.mkgray.com:8000/blog/Personal/Fathergood/Baby-Signs.html>mentioned earlier,
we've been doing "Baby Signs" with our daughter. A week or two
ago, she learned a new sign: She holds her hand flat, and with the
other hand makes a tapping/poking motion on the surface of her hand.
It means "board game". Can you see me beaming from here?

She loves playing her board games. Of course, as a 14-month-old,
"playing" means examining the bits, moving them around the board
fairly randomly and occasionally scattering them about. So far, we
play a lot of Chutes and Ladders (Sesam Street edition) where she
moves the pieces around the board (not even uniformly occupying
squares) and spins the spinner in whatever order she deems
appropriate. She has gotten down the notion that you move the pieces
a space at a time, even if her sense of "space" is any point roughly
an inch and a half from where it was before.

We also play a lot of Enchanted Forest and the last time we played was
quite a success. I put all the trees face down and asked her,
"Where's the wolf?" (The bottoms of the trees have pictures from fairy
tales) I then picked one up, looked at it and showed her, saying
"That's not a wolf, those are 7-league boots?" From then on she
picked up the trees one at a time, and I asked her if it was the wolf,
until she found it.

We've also tried Frechdachs (her first Reiner Knizia game) though she
doesn't seem to enjoy that one as much. She takes the bits in and out
of the "suitcases", but it doesn't hold her attention as long.

Cathedral has also been fun, though she's more interested in
scattering the pieces than putting them on the board, but that may
have just been a product of her mood.

Finally, Face-it has been a big success. Face-it has plastic pieces
that rest on a lattice grid. The other day, I put out the board,
grabbed the bag and took a piece out, placing it on the board. I then
handed her the bag. She drew a piece out, and put it on the board.
We proceeded to take turns, drawing and placing until the board was
full.

She'll be getting a few more good ones for Christmas.

Okay, so by most people's standards these aren't really "playing a
game", but as a father it's pretty exciting, especially that she'll
frequently be playing with a toy and she'll scoot over to me and sign, "Board game?"

(Also, see the href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist.php3?action=view&listid=11039>GeekList
version of this post for links to the games)

Essen 2005 Games

Yesterday, I got the chance to play a bunch of Essen 2005 games. Most notably I did not play Caylus, largely because the first game of it took well over 3 hours and I wasn't in the mood for that kind of duration. I'm sure with experience it gets shorter, but I'm a bit averse to games that start at 3.5 hours.
Here are my 1 or 2 play quick comments on each, in the order I played them:

Ark

Beautiful artwork, interesting if not especially amazing game, and it's desperately in need of a reference card. Without it, it was common to get confused about the various card placement limitations. I'm also not so sure there's much plan ahead, but it's cute and small.

Sushi Express

Super random, super light, quite fast, not bad.

Techno Witches

Surprisingly engaging pre-programmed measured movement race game. The components are nice and the mechanics are clever. My only wish is they had components for more than 4 players. It cries out for a Harry Potter brand licensing.

Rotundo

Odd Adlung game about collecing spherical objects. Not awful, but nothing too inspired and definitely an odd theme. I bet if you translated it to English and named it "Balls!", you'd get sales on the name alone. Gameplay has an interesting bit or two but ends up feeling mundane.

Elementals

Simple slap-jack style speed recognition games with attractively illustrated little elemental men. If you like that sort of thing, it's pretty good.

Elasund

Much better than Candamir. It doesn't feel that innovative, but it is a well crafted combination of familiar mechanics along with a few clever bits. If you like Catan-style development games, this is definitely worth a try.

Havoc

Disappointing. Very luck of the draw/draft driven and even when I felt I had control I didn't enjoy it much. It has some serious similarities to Taj Mahal, but I think I'd rather play that anyday. It might be better with fewer (we played with 6).

Mesopotamia

Nice exploration/development/pick-up-and-deliver game. The actions cards are a bit more variable in power level than I'd like ideally (ie, some are very good, some are quite poor) but it's still nice. The exploration element here is very light, but I like it. Plays reasonably quickly too.

King Solomon's Mine

Very cool, but in the end I didn't actually like it that much. Very nice components, though the levels of the stacks are often a bit difficult to read, which is crucial to gameplay. There's also a fair amount of downtime with minimal if any ability to plan ahead. I feel like something's there, but I'm not quite sure.

(See also the GeekList version of this)

"Hot" Games

People, including me, come up with all sorts of measures for
enumerating and ranking the "best" games. I personally am a big fan
of Joe Huber's "Happiness" metric, but find it not quite complete.
Briefly, the Huber Happiness of a game is: (rating-baseline)*(game
length * number of plays) where the rating and baseline are on a 0-10
scale (baseline of 4.5 is recommended) and game length is in minutes.
It's a good metric, especially for "best games of all time" and that
kind of thing. However, it misses two qualities I often want included in such a ranking: novelty and "replayability".

Actually, it partially encompasses replayability, in that it includes
number of plays, but this can be canceled out by game length. That
is, 9 plays of a 20 minute game (total, 3 hours) seems likely a
stronger indicator of replayability than 1 play of a 3 hour game or 2
plays of a 90 minute game. So, times played needs to get some more
weight. Of course, "novelty" only applies when looking at a time
window. When you're talking about "all time" there's no such thing.
But, when making something like a "game of the year" or "hot games
this month" list, older games should at least be penalized somewhat.

To this end, I've got a "hot games" metric I've been using for a few
years which I find does a great job of matching my subjective
perception. Having an objective measure of my subjective perception
has an advantage because I can look at my games lot and say "what was
the hot game for me in fall of 2003?" or the like without having to
have recorded it then.

So, my "hot games" metric is as follows:

P = plays of game during interval
T = plays of game, ever
H = Huber happiness from game during interval
S = 1 + (P/T)
X = S*S*sqrt(P)*H

where X is the final score. The "S" term gives a substantial (but not
overwhelming) bonus for novelty and the sqrt(P) term gives a bonus for
replayability.

What this yields is that my current hot game (looking over the past year) is Fiese Freunde Fette Feten. A year ago today, it was San Juan. A year before that, Electronic Catchphrase. A year before that, Puerto Rico. At some later point, I'll have to generate my (retroactive to 2000) "Matthew's Game of the Year" list or perhaps even "Hot Game of the Quarter".

Big Games: TI3e, Battlestations and American Megafauna

I don't tend to play a lot of long games. I play a lot of games that
take an hour or less. I play several that take an hour to two hours.
I occasionaly play a two to three hour game. I play games longer than
three hours very infrequently.

Despite this trend, I've played 3 games recently that exceeded this limit though.

First, over the summer I got to play American Megafauna multi-player
for the first time. American Megafauna is a brilliantly detailed evolution simulation game. I'd played it with the solitaire rules before and
found it very interesting, but I don't tend to like solitaire, so I
hoped this would yield an even more interesting multi-player game. I
was wrong. It's not awful, but the randomness that is interesting and
challenging in solitaire is dominating and annoying in the
multi-player game. If I recall correctly, this clocked in at just
over three hours, but it's not likely to be something I'll repeat
multi-player any time soon. Maybe I'll pull it out solitaire someday
when I feel like a good evolutionary romp.

Most recently, I played Twilight Imperium, 3rd edition. This was
good, but wow was it long. Including rules explanation, all four
players having never played before, and a dinner break, it took over
six hours, and we only played to 8 VP. There's a lot going on here,
and I expect to play it again, but it's a shame it is so demanding.
Certainly, with experienced players it would go much more quickly, but
the time required to get experienced would be substantial.

Finally, in late summer, I played href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/12350>Battlestations. This
is almost an RPG rather than a board game, but it's close enough.
It's a game of tactical space combat and boarding action. This was a
blast. Absolutely wonderful, with few qualifications. We played one
fairly elaborate scenario and it took about 5 hours, maybe a bit more
including rules. But, compared to a traditional RPG, this time
included teaching the rules, creating characters, playing the entire
"adventure" and wrap-up. It's been a while since I played a real RPG,
but a five hour session was never enough. Battlestations manages to
really successfully capture the feel of high-action space opera
science fiction. The rules are straightforward, if large. We played
where I acted as a GM, but you could clearly play in a more
traditional player-vs-player mode and have it work well. I really
look forward to trying this one again.

In summary:

• American Megafauna: C- (works better solitaire)
  
• Twilight Imperium, 3rd edition: B- (loses most of it's points for being really long)
  
• Battlestations: A+ (very fun experience game)